Monday, 19 January 2015

“It’s not Islam!” they say– but it is.

French President Hollande said
the murderous Paris terror attacks were “an insult to Islam.”

His Prime Minister, Manuel Valls,
said, “We are at war with terrorism and radical Islam.” Days later he
said France was at warwith “terrorism, jihadism and
radicalism." Then, in the same speech he said, "France
is not at war against Islam and Muslims," before
announcing a series of measures that will "draw on the lessons"
from last week's attacks.

How can you draw on the lessons if
you’re confused and cannot define what you’re fighting?

And don’t look for clarity and guidance
from the White House. President Obama has been in denial from day one. Not only
was he absent from the Parisian boulevard parade of world leaders he has been
MIA on Islamic terror since he took office. The best he came up with over the
French terrorist attacks was to pledge to stand with his allies against the “scourge”
of terrorism. Well good for him for his vacuous words. What scourge would that
be, Mr. President?

The problem with Europe and America
over the last couple of decades, apart from their political prevarication, has
been the loss of traditional values, mainly faith and honesty – two essential
pillars, if not the bedrock, of democracy.

They ditched faith decades ago for the
raunchy life of a free-ranging liberalism and secularism. Christian European
nations may still have crosses on the national flags, but they have ditched
Christianity. Church aisles are emptying. In many places churches have now
become mosques.

Socialist secularism has taken it upon
itself to replace Christian and Jewish community charity and caring with
state-run social and welfare benefits.
The welfare system, altruistic in intent, has brought with it a harmful
dependency for an increasing number of dysfunctional and single-parent
families. It also raised a generation with a chip on their shoulder and
rebellion in their heart.

One of the assets of a faith-based
society is the preservation of the tradition family as the foundation of a
solid social order. The strong maintenance of the family unit is found among
families with traditional Christian, Jewish and Muslim ethics. Sadly, this did
not prevent second generation Muslim immigrants from having an
anti-establishment grudge and a festering anti-Semitism, and they began acting
on their rebellion in crime and in noisy and often violent demonstrations. They
turned inward, finding a cause in Islam.

Honesty, truth, has been replaced by
censored speech in order not to offend anyone speaking out against the rise of
radical Muslims within a society. This censorship is called Islamophobia. It’s
OK to offend Christians, the Pope, and Jews, but be awfully careful what you
say about radical Islam. It may upset the people who make crude anti-Semitic
jokes, when they are not expressing their hate against Jews, but who get so
upset if you joke about Mohammed that they may actually kill you. Charlie
Hebdo, anyone!

Better to appease them. Better to say
that those that kill in the name of Allah are not actually acting in the name
of Islam, even when they shout “Allah Aqba!” and quote the Koran as they
partake in their bloody rampage. Funny how non–Muslims seem to know what isn't
Islam.

Better to hit on Israel, criticize it,
condemn it, threaten to sanction it, while ignoring Palestinian outrages, the
anti-Semitic rhetoric of its leaders, and the fact that Hamas is designated a
terrorist organization aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. Better not to say
that. It might offend Muslims, and we wouldn't want to do that, do we?

Wholesale beheadings in Syria and Iraq
by a group that calls itself Islamic State shocks a world that insists
that it’s not Islamic. Of course it is!

As a Jew, I don’t care much about
Mohammed. That would be an understatement. Ask me why.

One pertinent incident happened in 627
AD when Mohammed beheaded eight hundred Jewish men and boys at Medina and
enslaved the women and young girls. These people weren't even fighting him.
They were his trophy victims. Remind you of anything?

So, please, don’t tell me to ignore
Koranic history that is acted out across a large swathe of the globe today as
being somehow irrelevant to our day and age. Tell me I’m a cynic, but don’t
tell me I’m an Islamophobe. If Jews have learned anything it is that when
people say they want to kill us, they really mean it.

If somebody beheads eight hundred of my
people as part of a victory celebration, don’t tell me that I should respect
him as the leader of a peaceful religion.

I demand that they prove to me they are
a peaceful religion, because I don’t see any sign of it.

Don’t tell me that they are not
anti-Semitic. As an Israeli Jew I am surrounded by people baying for my death
and destruction, and my fellow Jews abroad are living under threat and fear.

Let me be brutally honest. The
Judeo-Christian world have had our own lunatics. When the Klu Klux Klan came in
the night with burning crosses, it took Christian America to eradicate this
form of Christian terrorism. They faced up to what confronted them and dealt
with it.

When Baruch Goldstein murdered Muslims
in Hebron he was, quite rightly, called a Jewish terrorist and condemned by all
Israelis. When Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli Prime Minister, Yizchak Rabin,
he was rightly called a radical Jewish terrorist. His action united everyone in
Israel against him with huge public demonstrations. The Israeli government
clamped down to remove this poison from our society. It was wall-to-wall words
and action to identify, name, shame, and remove this menace from our midst. We
put our house in order. So must the Muslim world with their radicalization.

Taking France as a case-study, not all
anti-Semitic viciousness is Muslim-based. The victimization of Officer Dreyfus
was embedded in the French military system. The Vichy government was a
right-wing fusion with fascism. The National Front cannot shake off their
anti-Jewish sentiment. But, in recent years, every murder of French Jews, all of
them, have been committed by Muslims of North African origin. That’s not Islamophobia
speaking. That’s a fact.

There is little hope that Socialist and
left-wing Europe can find its way out of the blind cul-de-sac of its political
creation. They compound the failure of their policies by offering more of the
same gruesome medicine that makes them even weaker.

Hope may be coming with the emergence
of a more conservative political wing grabbing what is left of indigenous
voters linked to moderates despairing of damaging progressivism and demanding
change.

Recently, British Home Secretary,
Theresa May, promised tougher action against anti-Semitism. Wouldn’t it be more
effective to hear from British imams that they will take tougher action against
anti-Semitism? Instead, their silence is troubling.

Western non-Muslims can confront
Islamic radicalism, but it must be the Muslim world that leads this struggle.
It is they who must put their house in order.

Just as Christianity and Judaism
reformed, so must Muslims reform and establish a modern, tolerant, more
enlightened form of their religion, and eradicate an ideology that kills more
of them than us. They must do it because this ideology is lodged in the heart
of their faith, not ours.

Failure to do so must make what is left
of a Judeo-Christian world suspicious that a silent inactive Muslim community
in their midst is in support of a global caliphate, lying dormant until they
join the final assault on what is left of the non-Muslim world.

For us to confront this ideology
without moderate Muslims taking the lead will simply be construed as a clash of
civilizations. Fortunately, we witness bright signs appearing on the horizon.
Blow-back is taking place in Egypt and Tunisia.

Egyptians rejected the Muslim
Brotherhood that was slowly imposing their harsh brand of Shariah. The new
President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, cracked down not only against the
Muslim Brotherhood but all forms of radical Islamic terror from Al-Qaida in the
Sinai to Palestinian Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the Middle East, and
increasingly large swathes of Africa, often stern measures to stabilize a
country must come before Western-style democracy can be established.

One Arab country, however, that did
succeed in shaking off three years of choking Islamist chaos and violence was
Tunisia. Tunisia began what is known as the Arab Spring with the suicide of
Mohammed Bouazizi, a simple vegetable seller who set himself alight in protest
against an oppressive regime. Now Tunisia democratically overthrew an Islamic
government. They drafted a new constitution before decisively defeating the
Islamists in parliamentary elections, followed by the presidential elections of
December 2014.

It would be good to see other Muslim
countries counter the shift to Islamism. The battle is still on in Libya.
Hezbollah holds too firm a grip in Lebanon. There is little hope for Turkey
under the oppressive rule of Erdogan who uses his governance to close down
opposition and a free press and gradually moving his people away from Ataturk
principles toward an Islamic agenda.

In America, President Obama has been
worryingly behind events. He was far too quick in promoting Islam in America.
He embraced the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood by giving them an
open door to the White House.

He failed to understand Egypt
post-Mubarak as Egyptians turned away from Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood
regime. He criticized el-Sisi, driving him into the arms of Russia, when he
should have been more perceptive and helpful.

He restricts language to his
policy-makers, intelligence, and military that disables them from naming the
enemy the United States is fighting, even though they clearly identify who they
are. Astoundingly, Obama is fixated on
closing Gitmo by releasing hardened Islamic terrorist leaders back to Yemen
and Pakistan to fight and kill again. America and the West will pay dearly for
this.

We have a long way to go. The West is
still unable to see what is happening not only in the Middle East, but in their own backyard. Their leading Muslim leaders are all too quiet.

When they tell you it’s not Islam you
know they have lost their political compass. They are losing their countries
out of sheer willful blindness and their inability to face the truth and deal
with it.